A parable of modern barbarity

The inquest continues tomorrow into the death of shy Fiona Pilkington, 38, who killed herself and her severely disabled daughter Francesca, 18, by setting fire to their car.

They had been bullied mercilessly by 'street kids' aged from ten to 14 in Barwell, Leicestershire, and, despite 33 pleas for help over seven years, the local police did nothing to help.

Indeed, the bullying increased after the family contacted police.

Harassment: Fiona Pilkington, left, killed herself and her disabled daughter Francesca after seven years of being bullied by 'street kids'

The coroner, Olivia Davison, is trying to discover why the family wasn't protected by 'common sense and old-fashioned policing'.

One police witness said the harassment of the Pilkington family 'didn't pass the threshold' of being a crime, despite smashed windows, death threats and Mrs Pilkington's handicapped son being pelted with stones as he cycled home.

She had written a series of letters to her MP saying she didn't know how to protect her children but was verbally abused by a parent for 'telling the police things'.

One of the offending youths told her the gang could do whatever it wanted and 'there is nothing you can do about it'.

This is one of the bleakest 'what kind of people have we become?' stories I have ever read.

Chris Tew, acting chief constable for Rutland and North Leicestershire, was questioned for four hours last week.

He admitted the police had failed to work out that the 33 pleas for help by the Pilkingtons all came from the same family.

Now the police are trained to spot such vulnerable people, he said. But the coroner told him: 'This family was patently vulnerable to the eye - you don't need training.'

A police officer who had visited the Pilkingtons saw they were clearly frightened. The coroner said: 'Why wasn't it open to him to take action? I'm hitting a wall here.'

Most of us hit a wall when we encounter such depravity. Our sentimental notions about the essential decency of ordinary people takes a knock.

But what occurred at Barwell is real life, not the saccharine imaginings of soap opera script writers which console us on TV.

Those who knew the Pilkingtons were being hounded and bullied - and said nothing - might say there was no point.

There's no public taste for punishing such hooliganism now, only for 'understanding' it.

The parents of the children involved might say 'we can't be everywhere at once, watching what they get up to, and, anyway, the kids weren't as bad as all that'.

Some might argue that the bullying didn't justify Fiona Pilkington's suicide by immolation, taking her daughter with her - that it was the act of an unbalanced person.

But it's clear Mrs Pilkington was driven to despair by the bullying - and, worse, the refusal of the police to prevent it from happening.

Poignantly, she didn't want the miscreants charged with criminal offences. Only for them to be told off by the police - as if that would have done any good.

They had already stepped up their attacks because she had reported the harassment.

Of course, we'll forget all about the story after this week. We never like to dwell on our beastliness.

It's more comforting to contemplate our essential goodness - even when we know, just beneath the surface, there's a whole alternative universe of ignorance and cruelty.

Without much hope of satisfaction, I hope those responsible for the sick, ignorant campaign of hatred against the defenceless Pilkingtons - including the culprits' parents - are exposed, charged and punished to the maximum.

Failing that, I'd at least like them all to be exposed to public gaze. It's important for us to see their faces.

Sorry, but this soft soap won't wash, Mr Balls

Like some Martian interloper anxious to avoid detection, Gordon Brown's former bag carrier Ed Balls - elevated these days to the Cabinet position of Children's Secretary - now portrays himself as a normal human being, presumably in the hope of inheriting supreme power when our Fifeshire Prime Minister falls under the electoral bus.

Talking about his hectic Yorkshire/London partnership-in-power-marriage with Work And Pensions Secretary wife Yvette Cooper, he vouchsafes in an interview, perhaps to show his charming side: 'I do the supermarket shopping online, but sometimes I press the wrong delivery address, and it goes to the wrong home.

'Next thing I know, the van driver is on the phone saying he's outside, but we're hundreds of miles away.'

Polishing his resume, Balls says he can make £2billion of savings in his department, sacking thousands of staff and cutting pay, adding: 'We are going to have to be disciplined on public sector pay, including in education.'

Surely he should have saved the £2billion by now, if that's what he believes. And he should always have been 'disciplined' about public sector pay.

But, as an alien - i.e., a politician - he might not see that.

The desire some have to become politicians always arouses suspicion, and rightly so.

When a couple are driven to seek power over us, it is more than doubly suspicious.

No amount of charming stories about missing groceries and hectic lives can quite remove the unease we feel about them plotting their futures together on the public purse.

Charles should make time for Arnhem heroes

Considering the fuss the Royal Family makes over heading our Armed Forces, it's surprising the Prince of Wales couldn't find time to attend the Parachute Regiment's 65th anniversary of Arnhem events at the weekend.

He is their Colonel-in-Chief. When invited, he pleaded 'other commitments'.

But yesterday the Prince was at Birkhall, his Scottish home, with no engagements listed in his official diary. Naturally, Parachute Regiment veterans are disappointed.

'The National Lottery provided £850 for me and a carer to get here, but not seeing the Colonel-in-Chief is astonishing,' said Bob Jones, 86, the youngest member of 1st Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers, to drop into Arnhem on September 17, 1944.

'Charles should definitely have been here.'

A prominent Tory MP who asked for anonymity - they're traditionally rather squeamish about criticising the Crown - said: 'Many of these chaps are getting on and may not be with us for the 70th anniversary in five years' time.

'By not being there, Charles gives the impression he is too idle to do so.'

The Prince did attend the 60th anniversary and, say his officials, 'has regular meetings with officers and men'.

But, as Colonel-in-Chief, he should have been there at the weekend. Or had a plausible reason for being elsewhere.

His father, Prince Philip, managed to attend a special memorial service at Oosterbeek ceremony near Arnhem yesterday.

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The filming of Indian Summer, in which Hugh Grant and Cate Blanchett play, respectively, our former Indian viceroy Lord Mountbatten and his wife, Lady Edwina, has been halted while the New Delhi government assesses the latter's relationship with its revered leader, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Were they lovers or close friends? Apparently the film script suggests the former.

But Nehru's biographer, M.J. Akbar, says: 'Why should we go over these things? There were human beings living at a difficult moment in history.

'Jawaharlal would have been attracted, and he was attractive, but it's time to forget about it.'

The official position of the Mountbatten family is that the relationship was intense but platonic, although Nehru said in a letter to Lady Edwina, ten years after independence, that 'some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another'. Which sounds like a line from a Carry On film.

India's an increasingly important world player. We're desperate to get our sticky fingers on her rupees.

So it might be better if their feelings about saintly Nehru were preserved, and the movie stuck to the platonic line.

Isn't it a mercy Grant's not playing Nehru?

I am not sure the famously priapic Hugh - great actor that he is - could carry off intense platonic love. Playing a royal cuckold will surely tax his thespian powers enough.

Lawmaker, lawbreaker

After the Mail reported that the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, employed an illegal immigrant, Gordon Brown announced that his chief legal officers had called in the UK Border Agency to ascertain the status of her Tongan cleaner, Loloahi Tapui.

This is New Labour's chosen method of closing down an embarrassing story. It stifles Opposition criticism and provides a breathing space while an escape route is sought.

What made an obviously bright woman, who must have thought hard about every facet of the law in question, think she didn't have to be totally scrupulous about those she employed, including fully checking Ms Tapui's status with the Home Office?

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* Referring to how they shot dead barrister Mark Saunders, who had let off his shotgun at neighbours (harmlessly) from his house in Chelsea last year, a Met Police spokesman says: 'No officer would ever wish to have to shoot someone during the course of their duty, but they are prepared to take the most appropriate action where necessary to protect the public and their colleagues.

'Any loss of life, no matter what the circumstances, is a tragedy. Our thoughts remain with the family of Mr Saunders.'

A cannily-composed (not to say slippery) statement, but is it right that the seven officers involved merely had to submit written statements and were not interviewed?

Doesn't his family have a right to know why those who shot him dead felt they had no other option?

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* To Blenheim Palace at the weekend to hear three war correspondents, the Independent's Robert Fisk, broadcaster Martin Bell and our own Dame Ann Leslie, discuss the difficulties of their trade.

Their message: war reporting now, especially on TV, is all trivialised, with 'Avonladies' - Ann's name for overmadeup broadcasters - projecting themselves rather than the news.

The packed audience loved it, and I was glad my colleagues can pull in the crowds, but I found myself wondering disloyally afterwards if touring literary festival tents as a war correspondent isn't part of the trivialisation all three deplore.